Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Planning Time

It’s Wednesday in our week of “vacation” of sorts. The other little girl who schools with us is on vacation, so we are taking a bit of a break too. It is nice to get a break every now and then, especially to make you appreciate what you have!!

The extra time I have had has been spent researching a plan for November and December. While we will keep on track with regular school in November, I wanted to incorporate something dealing with Gratitude and also with the history behind Thanksgiving. I found a couple different things for these topics, but my favorite, and the one I think we will use is Attitude of Gratitude Lapbook. It is a 12 lesson plan with some great ideas!!

We will also listen to, and read Thanksgiving A Time To Remember by Barbara Rainey – this is a family favorite! The book is awesome, but the audio drama is our favorite part! We listen every year!

So with the history part covered by our book & CD, and the gratitude part covered by our lapbook, I think I have a plan!!

For December, we continue to do math, but we take a break from Ambleside (our normal schedule) and take the month to “play & learn” Christmas style. So, yesterday the kids and I came up with the 25 activities for our Advent Activity Plan. We listed out 25 things we want to do in the month of December, now I will type them up and put them in numbered enveloped for us to open each day.

In the past, this seemed like a lot to do. I kind of avoided this. But this year, I think with our additional student I feel more inclined to make sure we are not skipping/missing something fun, that with a tiny bit of planning, could be lots of fun!

You can see our download of 25 Advent Activities if you want to see what we are “planning” to do. I tried to keep the list manageable so that we do make a point to do them, many days are reading one of our Christmas books, or even a few movies sprinkled in – they are not in any order, in a few days I will order them according to our calendar.

I try to add a Christmas movie to our collection each year, and a few books too. This year I added from half.com : Polar Express, Owl Moon, and God Gave Us Christmas. (I think they were .75cents each – with additional for shipping) I put up all our Christmas books with the decorations each year too, to keep them fresh each year.

About Me

I spend my days teaching my 4 kids to love God and love education. You will usually catch us with a book in our hands, playing in the garden, or cooking in the kitchen! We love this country life we jumped into in 2010! This blog is where we share our life adventures and the things we are passionate about!!